A
"new" old rocket sprouted on Wednesday inside the Rocket Garden at
NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.

The
second stage of a restored Air Force Titan II missile, topped with a
mockup of
NASA's historic two-seat Gemini spacecraft, was hoisted up by crane and
bolted atop the
booster's first stage, completing the 109-foot (33-meter) display.

The
tallest rocket now standing among the center's seven other legacy
launch
vehicles ? surpassed only in length by the 224-foot Apollo-Saturn IB
that lies
on its side ? the Gemini-Titan fills the open
space left by an
earlier replica of the same rocket.

Removed
for a routine inspection in 2006 but deemed too far gone to be
refurbished, the
earlier replica was shipped
in June to Johnson
Space Center in Houston, in anticipation of the new Titan taking its
place.

With
the garden whole again, curator Daniel Gruenbaum said in an interview
with
collectSPACE.com that the Gemini-Titan was not just another booster
added to
the collection, but an important piece for telling the history of the
United
States in space.

"That
poor unsung hero of the early NASA programs," he said, referring to the
ten
manned Gemini missions that flew in 1965 and 1966. "Mercury
proved
that we could go to space and live but Gemini proved that we can live
in space,
we can stay in space, we can walk in space, we can dock in space, we
can
rendezvous and dock, we can go to the moon."

He
added, "Gemini proved we could go to the moon. Apollo gets all the
glory
for going to the moon but we didn't know how to be in space and in the
Gemini
program we learned how to be in space."

Re-staging
the Gemini-Titan

The
newly-erected Gemini-Titan is a more accurate replica of the rocket
than what
previously stood in its place.

"We
had a model of a Gemini-Titan that sat in the Rocket Garden for many
years ?
over 20 years. It was a mockup of two first stages of Titan I vehicles,
which
are similar [to the Titan II that launched Gemini] but different,"
explained Gruenbaum.

As
part of their regular maintenance program, the center's staff removed
the
original Gemini-Titan for inspection four years ago.

"It
was pretty rough, structurally. It was going to take a lot of effort to
rebuild
it," recalled Gruenbaum.

As
it turned out though, rebuilding wasn't the only option. Through a
contact he
made at Lockheed Martin in Denver, Gruenbaum learned of a potential
replacement
? one that would be historically more accurate.

"Through
some long negotiations, first with the Air Force space and missile
office and
then the General Services Administration ? the government property arm
? we
were able to obtain an actual Titan II launch vehicle and we put a
Gemini
capsule on it," he said.

The
Titan II missile was among a group of 18 held at the Aerospace
Maintenance and
Regeneration Group, the Air Force's boneyard, in Tucson, Arizona. All
18
rockets were scheduled to be shredded and recycled as scrap metal.

"It
was just almost two years to actually acquire. It was arduous to get an
agreement to get this vehicle to be transferred to NASA. It's now a
NASA
vehicle, it is not on loan," Gruenbaum told collectSPACE.com.

Obtaining
the Titan
was only half the challenge though. The rocket had been demilitarized
by the
Department of Defense, which resulted in sections of the booster being
removed
and parts being disassembled.

The
visitor complex turned to Guard-Lee, a manufacturer of aerospace
replicas and
restorations in nearby Apopka, Florida, to convert the intercontinental
ballistic missile into a replica of the man-rated rocket that launched
the
United States' first two-person crews.

A
significant part of that work ? which ultimately took 20 months to
complete ?
required adapting a spare interstage section to patch three areas of
the
Titan's stages that had been cut away to remove asbestos and other
hazardous
materials.

And
then there were the engines.

"When
we received them, they were all disassembled," explained Tom Wilkes,
president of Guard-Lee. "So we had to go to original schematics and
things
like that."

Wilkes
and his team referred to vintage documents and archival photos to
ensure that
the two LR-87 first stage engines were assembled correctly.

"Since
the second stage engine doesn't show, we elected not to try to build a
second
stage engine," Gruenbaum said, referring to the single LR-91 that
pushed
the Gemini spacecraft into orbit.

Mirroring
space history

The
end result is an authentic display that Wilkes said not only represents
the vehicle
well, but also the way in which the U.S. approached its early manned
spaceflight efforts.

"From
engines up to the very top of the second stage is a warbird of the
past. We
built a replica Gemini to put on top of it. But in a way, that mirrors
what happened
in the Cold War-era, because when it came time to launch men in space,
we
turned to our military boosters to do that," said Wilkes. "These
things kind of mirror that because almost all the boosters are military
origin
and they are artifacts ? they just happen to have replica payloads on
the
top."

According
to Wilkes, the Gemini-Titan now standing in the Kennedy Space Center
Visitor
Complex's Rocket Garden also mirrors all the Gemini-Titan launch
vehicles
launched during the mid-1960s program.

"We
modeled it off of Gemini 3 but if you line up Gemini boosters across
and try to
pick one for a specific mission, it is really hard. You have to look
for the
serial numbers. There were not too many differences."